Violent clashes in December and January, including two mass killings, left 46 people dead. But “security forces were not to blame” for these incidents, she said. Instead, it was one group of protesters that fatally attacked another, with firearms smuggled over the southeastern border from Bolivia.

At a January 24 press conference, Boluarte cited only “unofficial” sources when she told reporters that most of the people killed in a recent confrontation in Puno, a predominantly Indigenous region that borders Bolivia, died after being shot with “a homemade weapon known as dum-dum,” in an apparent reference to expanding bullets that explode inside victims’ bodies. “The police do not use this type of lethal weapon,” she said.

“This is not peaceful protest,” she continued. “It’s a violent action by a group of radicals with a political and economic agenda driven by drug trafficking, mining, and contraband.”

But there is no evidence to support this story, as Boluarte herself appeared to acknowledge in her remarks to the media.

Extensive cell phone footage from the two mass killings — one in Ayacucho that left 10 dead and the other in Puno, which killed 18 — shows the National Police of Peru and the Peruvian armed forces opening fire on civilians. In both cases, people were killed by gunfire, according to Peru’s official human rights agency.

In the week following Boluarte’s press conference, Peru’s two leading investigative journalism outlets, OjoPublico and IDLReporteros, came out with exposes clearly laying out evidence that pointed to the national police and the army. The former published details of the autopsies, which found police munitions in the bodies of many of the dead protesters. The latter painstakingly reconstructed the Ayacucho deaths to show how the military used live rounds against civilians.

A few days later, Amnesty International published its own investigation, in which it accused the national police of “unlawfully” and “indiscriminately” using lethal force against “mostly peaceful” protests. The human rights group also warned that the killings had been motivated by “systemic racism ingrained in Peruvian society.”

This is all hard to take for many Peruvians, who have endured almost continual political chaos since 2018 — with six different presidents in five years. The current unrest is the result of the ousting of Pedro Castillo, whose 17 months in power were dominated by graft scandals and infighting on the far left. Castillo was removed from office by Peru’s Congress, after he attempted to dissolve the legislative body, overhaul the courts and rule by decree, just as anti-corruption prosecutors were closing in on him. Boluarte shared a self-declared Marxist-Leninist ticket with Castillo in the 2021 elections but allied herself with the far-right majority in the Congress as soon as she was sworn in as president, possibly to head off her own ideologically-driven impeachment.

The protests, which have no clear leader, initially called for Castillo’s reinstatement. But now demonstrators are targeting Boluarte and the Congress and demanding new elections. The president’s popularity has dipped to 15% and Congress’ to just 6%, according to one poll. The same study found that three-quarters of Peruvians want Boluarte to resign.

It is no coincidence that in a society divided by race, class and geography, where half of the population is food insecure, most of those protesting are the have-nots who have been largely excluded from Peru’s economic boom of the last two decades. Southern Peru, the epicenter of the turmoil, is the country’s poorest region, where many rural families have no running water or electricity. 

Although Boluarte has claimed to want “dialogue” and to never have authorized the use of deadly force against demonstrators, she has also repeatedly defended the national police, calling their handling of the protests “immaculate.” Compounding this are racist dog whistles from the military and far-right government leaders dismissing the protestors. Boluarte’s first head of military intelligence, Juan Carlos Liendo, insists that the left has sought to use Castillo’s ouster to divide Peruvians by income and ethnicity.

But in an interview, Liendo,  now a frequent analyst on Peruvian TV, appeared to do exactly that by blaming the unrest on the “Andean man,” a reference to Peruvians from mountain communities of Indigenous origin.

“The Andean man is very prone to violence. If you look at the history of Latin America, Peru is the most violent country. The societies that are most violent are those that live in the mountains, not in the jungle, unless it is jungles with mountains, like Vietnam.”

Ultimately, Liendo’s views proved too extreme even for Boluarte, who forced him out just a week after appointing him. But her broader views do not seem to have changed.

Lawmakers, most of Peru’s heavily-concentrated media and Boluarte herself also frequently conflate the unrest, which has included vandalism and rioting, with “terrorism.”

Falsely accusing one’s political opponents of terrorism — known in Peru as “terruqueo” — has a very particular and painful meaning for Peruvians. A well-established practice of the Peruvian far right, it is a reminder of the traumas triggered by the Shining Path guerilla insurgency of the 1980s and 1990s. The armed Maoist rebels launched a conflict that, according to the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission report, took the lives of an estimated 69,000 Peruvians, most of them civilians.

Today, the last remnants of the Shining Path, which formally laid down its arms in 1994, have given up their revolutionary agenda and instead are providing protection to the cocaine trade in a remote, densely-forested area of the eastern Andean foothills.

On February 11, the group ambushed a police patrol deep in the cloud forest, killing seven officers. Yet no serious expert believes that the group still has the capacity to influence events beyond the immediate region, much less mobilize national anti-government protests. 

“The narrative doesn’t have to be logical. It just needs to be emotive,” said Eduardo González, a sociologist who advised the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. “The government needs a monster, to create moral panic. This just shows that memory is a battle. It’s not reflexive or easy.” 

Antonio Zapata, a historian at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, pointed to the moral panic over communism in the 1930s. 

“Terruqueo is just the latest way in which the elites see the country,” said Zapata. “They always need an external agent. Now it’s Evo [Morales, the former socialist president of Bolivia], before it was Fidel and before that it was Stalin. Like all efficient lies, it has to be woven together with elements of the truth.”

This scare tactic has allowed the government to declare states of emergency in several of the protest hotspots, restricting the right to assembly and allowing warrantless searches of homes. Separately, it has introduced a bill to toughen already-steep penalties for public order offenses with fast track trials that violate basic due process norms.

Prosecutors even set up a terrorism hotline for citizens to report supposed “revolutionaries.” Chief prosecutor Patricia Benavides has converted several offices specializing in human rights abuses, including those committed by the state, into counter-terrorism units. 

At Lima’s San Marcos University, the oldest university in the Americas, riot police and anti-terrorism officers arrested 193 students and protestors, before being forced to free all but one of them for lack of evidence. The ultra-conservative mayor of Lima, Rafael López Aliaga, has also banned protests downtown in an obvious breach of the national constitution.

Meanwhile, an extreme-right group, which calls itself the Resistance and has ties to the mayor, has harassed and intimidated journalists and officials perceived to be progressive for months without prosecutors or the national police  lifting a finger. On February 21, the Resistance staged a rowdy picket outside the home of Gustavo Gorriti, a prominent journalist who heads IDL Reporteros, chanting antisemitic slogans. Police officers refused to intervene.

In many ways, Peru’s current turmoil feels like deja vu. Nearly 30% of those killed when the Shining Path was at its most powerful — some 20,000 people — died at the hands of the military and the police, according to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a fact that Peru’s authoritarian right still refuses to acknowledge. That grim story is laid out at the Place of Memory, a gray concrete museum overlooking the Pacific in Lima that memorializes the internal conflict. Lima’s mayor López Aliaga wants to hand over the control of the museum to the military, which would likely erase any mention of its own atrocities.

“It’s not that we don’t remember,” said Zapata, the historian. “It’s what we remember. On one side, there is this memory of being marginalized, excluded, of always being defeated. On the other, there is this memory of how to exclude and marginalize and how to defend privileges.”

That struggle for memory over the bloodletting of the 1980s and 1990s has never been far from the surface in Peru. But it has now detonated into a new, critical confrontation over Peru’s present.

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THE STORY

Peru has been in turmoil since December, with the removal of former union leader Pedro Castillo as president. Peruvian prosecutors said earlier this month that they would be investigating the conduct of the police, the army and other security personnel who used deadly force against protesters. Much of the violence and unrest over the last year is directly a result of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Even in April, last year, reports connected anger over inflation in Peru with the rising price of oil as a result of Putin’s war. But one year since the war began, the full extent of its effect is apparent in Peru. The country is now, according to the UN, the most food insecure country in South America. Disruption to the fertilizer supply chain, 500,000 tons of which came annually from Russia and Ukraine, is now deepening a pre-existing food crisis initially triggered by the pandemic. It’s a pattern repeated in countries such as Malawi, where 20% of the population faces acute food insecurity as a result of high fertilizer prices.

Last week, the G20’s finance ministers gathered in Bengaluru in India. Predictably, they failed to come up with a joint statement about the war in Ukraine. An Indian official said the Chinese and Russian representatives refused to sign a statement because their mandate was to “deal with economic and financial issues.” On the other hand, added the Indian official, the other 18 countries “felt that the war had implications for the global economy.”

Those implications are, clarifies the UN’s World Food Program (WFP), that over 345 million people will be food insecure in 2023. Fertilizer prices have risen even faster than skyrocketing food prices, the WFP notes, which “could turn the current food affordability crisis into a food availability crisis.”

“Everything just keeps going up,” says Nancy Torres in Peru’s capital, Lima, referring to the prices. She works in a soup kitchen and relies on it to feed her own family. “It’s getting impossible,” she says. “The war has been bad and our politicians are a disaster.”

WHY IT MATTERS

The war in Ukraine turbocharged rising food costs in Peru, first by hitting imports of fuel and cereals and now through the loss of fertilizer. Amid Peru’s political turmoil, the government has repeatedly failed to find alternative sources, with several purchases collapsing amid corruption allegations. Inflation is the highest it's been in a quarter century. 

Peru, incidentally, is classified by the World Bank as an upper middle income country that can produce all the food it needs. But the fertilizer shortage now makes even growing food a major concern. The problem will not just be, for instance, that the price of potatoes has tripled and the price of chicken has doubled, it will be that producing food might become unaffordable.  

The price of fertilizer, or urea, surged from around $250 a ton to $925 because of the war, says Fernando Cilloniz. His company grows grapes on 75 hectares of land, some four hours south of Lima. “Without urea, there are no grapes,” he says. “It’s been an absolutely terrible year. We could still get urea but the price was ridiculous.” His company paid the higher price as the alternative would have been to completely write off 2022.

According to the International Monetary Fund, rising food and fertilizer prices will add $9 billion to the import bills of 48 of the most affected nations. It shows how vulnerable much of the world is to disaster because of the reliance on just a few countries to provide global commodities. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute pointed out that there have been 12,500 protests in 2022 about food, energy and the cost of living. Many of these protests took place in Europe, but some of the most destabilizing effects have been felt in countries as far afield as Ecuador, Peru, Lebanon, Egypt and Sri Lanka.

THE FALLOUT

As food insecurity looks set to grow, perhaps the most enduring global effect of Russia’s aggression in Ukraine will be a hunger crisis precipitated not just by the rising prices of staple items but by the way in which the war undermines the ability of the most vulnerable countries to feed themselves. 

The food and fertilizer crisis has led many Peruvians to turn to soup kitchens to relieve their daily struggles. On the day I met Nancy Torres and her team, they were preparing a stew of potatoes and beef lung to serve with rice. It was one of the cheapest cuts of beef, but also a rare treat for the diners. On most days, the menu is vegetarian, with either chicken or fish available once a week. 

Such soup kitchens, known as ollas comunes, literally “common pots,” have long helped the urban poor in Lima. Torres is one of three women who prepare between 100 and 150 meals each weekday. The soup kitchen’s 20 members collect the food in plastic containers around noon and share them at home with their families. Based in a shanty without electricity or water in Villa El Salvador, a sprawling, gritty suburb in the arid Andean foothills south of Lima, the Beatita Melchorita soup kitchen relies on rice, oil and pulses donated by the government augmented with whatever other bargain ingredients the trio can pick up in local markets. 

Before the war in Ukraine, Peru’s agricultural sector was an economic success story worth some $10 billion a year. Peru, for instance, is now the world’s largest exporter of blueberries. But Peru, like much of Latin America, is hugely dependent on Russia for the majority of its fertilizer imports. Its struggle to access fertilizer is a recipe for economic disaster.

“We have to scour everywhere to find ingredients that we can afford. They told us about the war,” Torres said. “But it seems very far away.”

Simeon Tegel contributed reporting from Lima.

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Indian officials searched BBC offices in Delhi and Mumbai earlier this week, seizing journalists’ mobile phones and other devices as part of an alleged investigation into tax evasion. This is just the latest in a series of threats against media that have played out in India in recent years. For its part, BBC has been in the crosshairs since the airing of a documentary about Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s role in the 2002 riots in Gujarat, that resulted in the killing of a thousand people, most of them Muslim. As we reported last month, officials did all they could to bar people from seeing the film in India. But the BBC is just one among many media outlets that have become targets of the regime because of their reporting. More on this below.

Turkish President Erdogan seems concerned as ever about his public image following last week’s 7.8 magnitude earthquake that has claimed the lives of more than 40,000 people in Turkey and Syria. He put the public on notice, warning in a speech that authorities are “closely monitoring those who are trying to polarize the nation through fake news and distortions.” Indeed, publicly reporting on or criticizing the state’s response has become a risky move for journalists and anyone on social media. State security authorities tweeted that they had identified hundreds of social media accounts for sharing “provocative posts about the earthquake on social media platforms” or posts that aimed to “spread fear or panic among the public.” Officials said 47 account holders had been either detained or arrested, and reports of journalists being investigated or barred from covering the quake continue to roll in. The government also has swiftly rolled out a “Disinformation Reporting Service” app where anyone can file reports about “manipulative” information in the news or on social media. For more, I recommend Arzu Geybullayeva’s coverage of media repression in Turkey for Global Voices.

Social media users are under fire in Peru after two months of intense protests and deadly confrontations between security forces and demonstrators. Authorities have paved the way for members of the public to report social media users suspected of supporting or inciting “acts of terrorism” through a public web portal. This is a direct reference to the protests themselves, which have raged since authorities arrested president Pedro Castillo for attempting to dissolve congress leading up to an impeachment vote. A leftist and relative newcomer to Peru’s political sphere, Castillo has broad support among working class people. Vice President Dina Boluarte has since taken office and become the country’s sixth president in just five years. She appears to have aligned herself with far-right politicians who characterize protesters as “terrorists,” a practice known as “terruqueo” in Peru. 

Amnesty International’s Peru office called the portal a tool for “harassment and criminalization in the current context of socio-political crisis in which social protests are strongly repressed and critical positions towards the government are loaded with accusations of ‘terruqueo.’

MODI’S CRUSADE AGAINST ‘FAKE NEWS’

By: Alishan Jafri

It is becoming ever-more difficult to criticize the government and ruling Bharatiya Janata party of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, whether you’re making a documentary, writing for a newspaper or just tweeting your opinion.

As elections in India inch closer, the Modi government has introduced a draft policy that would effectively establish a social media censorship arm within the fact-checking unit of the government’s Press Information Bureau. Proposed amendments (to the country’s already-restrictive 2021 IT Rules) would empower the unit to order social media companies to pull down content that it marks as false information. The period for public comment on the amendment will end next week.

It is worth underlining how preposterous it is that the Modi government has empowered itself to be an arbiter of truth, given its notoriety for spreading false information to achieve political gain. If the proposed amendments are adopted, they will further strengthen the regime's sway over dominant narratives on social media and bolster the attempts of his political party, the BJP to rein in all forms of critical media and instead promote its own narrative agenda. This is information control, plain and simple, and it is happening despite checks and balances built into the system to prevent exactly this type of abuse.

This particular change would also increase state control over Big Tech in the country. The 2021 IT Rules forced foreign social media companies — namely Meta, Google, and Twitter, which took its time to comply — to establish offices in-country and appoint special staffers for those offices, including an “India-based Nodal contact person for 24/7 availability for coordination with law enforcement agencies.” In lay terms, this means that companies now must adjudicate content according to the government’s wishes, or else risk being banished from the 1.4 billion-strong market. Twitter’s most recent transparency report revealed that India topped the list of countries with demands to block content posted by verified journalists. Interestingly, Turkey was also right up there.

DigiPub, a consortium of independent online media in India, published a brusque reaction to the amendments, arguing that they would give the government of India “arbitrary and discretionary power” to decide whether or not online content is “fake,” and could “undermine a journalist’s duty to speak truth to power and thereby undercut the principles of accountability/transparency and have the potential to suppress not just fake news but the truth.” This view was echoed in the editorials of major newspapers across India. Legal experts at India’s Internet Freedom Foundation have pointed out that the proposed changes circumvent parliamentary procedures and run afoul of the constitutional right to freedom of speech.

In the wake of the loud flak, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology, said that if media organizations can demonstrate how the proposed alterations impede their work, the government can rephrase the amendments. But it’s hard to imagine at this stage that the move won’t result in even more pressure on media and independent voices to either toe the line or stay silent.

WHAT WE’RE READING

• Last week, I interviewed tech law expert Farieha Aziz about the Pakistani government’s decision to block Wikipedia over “sacreligious” content. The ban has already been lifted, and Aziz wrote an enlightening critique of the debacle for Dawn.

• Drones and spy balloons are capturing more than their share of headlines these days, but they’re probably just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the overlap between big tech and the military. Writing for the Transnational Institute last week, anthropologist Roberto González argued that “it is impossible to fully understand the U.S. military today without an analysis of its deep connections to the tech industry.” Yikes.

• A new report by Moira Weigel, for Data & Society, looks at third-party sellers on Amazon and highlights how the e-commerce giant has “given rise to new kinds of small businesses — ones optimized for Amazon.”

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